Bernie_by_the_Sea wrote:There's another one of those cultic emotive symbols.
Cult? Emotive? No, I just think you're wrong, and I tend towards vigorous confrontation in my responses to such staggering volumes of nonsense as you have posted in this thread.
A near-infinite supply always tends towards zero demand.
Your problem is twofold: you've used two meanings of "demand," one which hinges upon market and retail value and one which you have used to denigrate the worth of Linux, and you ignore that I am addressing the notion of causality and consequence. The inverse relationship between supply and demand does indeed hold, but my point is a sort of chicken-v-egg thing, in that the demand ($) in this case is low
as a result of the huge supply, and
not- as you seem to claim- that the demand is low because of technical and practical inferiority.
People will accept some things free that they aren't willing to buy. Illegal downloading or copying exists because government lacks the ability to stop it. In a free market it is not possible for a product that sells to be overpriced.
Are you nuts? Sure, you
can charge whatever you want, but that doesn't mean the market has to agree and bear the price. Black markets exist (by definition of a black market) in two sets of circumstances which are not mutually exclusive: one, when a good or service is banned (prostitution, narcotics, etc.) or two, when services and/or goods are exchanged
via illegal means to avoid taxes or exceedingly high prices. Both involve illegal activity, but only one is motivated by the illegality of the trade itself.
Black markets still follow the basic economic rules of scarcity, and do not exist in some sort of a vacuum. The main reason a 'black market' (I continue to bracket it, as money rarely if ever changes hands, and there's no bartering, etc. going on) exists with digital files in violation of copyright law is that distributors (record companies, stores, etc.) have yet to accept that when digital files are given to persons with their own means of production (digital copy machines, i.e. computers) then there is nothing but law keeping the means of production and distribution exclusive to those companies. Effectively, if the laws that artificially introduce scarcity into that market are simply broken, you get damn near infinite abundance, and the price drops. That a collection of law makes the market into a 'black market' does not stifle the economic reality of the situation; digital music prices have indeed gotten much lower, as have CD and DVD prices, mostly because of this.
A business distributing and copying digital goods is at best not long for this world, in the absence of a proficient totalitarian state set on enforcing copyright law. This leads to one of two conclusions, which are mutually exclusive: either the old business model dies, just like so many others, or the state becomes interested in arresting and imprisoning those who threaten the tenability of such an industry, or the industry dies. (Given that the expressed purpose of copyright law (and patents) is not to protect an intangible property right but to promote the general progress in a utilitarian sense, I can't see how a legal scholar would rationally sell the totalitarian option.)
Do you imagine Windows is Microsoft's only product?
No, but the rest of their business sits on top of it. No Windows, then no Office. No Windows, not bulk-sale deals with OEMs and businesses. (The rest of their business beyond Windows and Office is largely a giant money hole at this point; Windows and Office make money, and pretty much everything else loses it.)
Do you understand the concept of backwards compatibility or co-compatibility?
Yes, I do. In fact, it's one of the main reasons that so many of Window's current security problems and bugs can be traced back as vestigial features originating in very early versions of the NT kernel or even DOS.
Maybe it's your explanation that makes it sound so incredulous.
Not really. Basically, engineers are usually surprised that such an important element of the system is centralized- meaning it's a potential
single point of failure- and that it gets modified on-the-fly, while the systems and applications are running and potentially relying upon it, and they further don't seem to like that it covers settings for everything, from drivers and RAM usage to application settings. It also means that installers for Windows have become more and more complex, which introduces yet more chance for errors. Because everything sits in one place, errors from one application or service accessing the registry can wipe out everything and screw up the whole OS.
Frankly, the older method of using individual INI files
looked messier in a file browser, but would make it much easier to mitigate and fix errors. They'd only need to update their methods to store individual users' settings in dedicated files instead of using one INI for everyone.
TL;DR: The registry offers no improvement over separate settings files, but it does make the system's innards look superficially tidier while actually introducing needless additional complexity and potential for system-wide failure. It plays fast and loose with basic engineering principles to be applied to the design of any robust system.